GeForce GTX 275 - an ecosystem, right?
Sucking it upNVIDIA's clearly swallowing a bunch of margin with a prospective etail price of £199 on day of launch, making it cheaper than the Radeon HD 4890 OC variant. The pricing is competitive, so much so that it casts serious questions on how a £299 GTX 285 can be considered a viable proposition.
Trimming off a few performance-enhancing hardware features from the full-fat GTX 285, the new GPU is entirely predictable: there's no significantly new hardware to speak of. NVIDIA's countering the Radeon HD 4890 threat with a GPU that, on paper, can match it well.
We're informed that today marks a hard-launch of the card with stock available in the channel, but we're not so sure. The to-and-fro shenanigans between the two companies means that release dates have been jigged on a regular basis, but our guess, which we'll confirm later, is that ATI has considerably more launch-day stock than NVIDIA, who was originally intending to release the card on April 9th. We'll do our usual launch-day analysis a little later on.
CUDA and PhysX
With no really new architectures coming to the fore until DX11 is made public with Windows 7 retail, NVIDIA's been banging on the CUDA and PhysX drum, incessantly so, and we'll examine the overall proposition in a separate article.
ForceWare R185 drivers
Complementing the launch of the GTX 275, NVIDIA is releasing R185 drivers, to support a variety of present cards. What's in a name, you might ask? NVIDIA informs us that the driver boasts some genuinely decent performance increases over incumbent R182, with the gains particularly apparent when dialling up image quality through copious amounts of AA and AF goodness. The gains, amounting to some 10 per cent on average, are made possible through driver tweaking for better texture management, improved z-cull and AA algorithm efficiency, SLI improvements, and, on select games, the addition of ambient occlusion/soft shadows.
We've tested with ForceWare 185.63, but the public will be able to download R185.65, which we're told are practically no different.
